VMware's vSphere has become the Virtualization standard for any company wanting to run its IT infrastructure in a virtualized mode. Tracing the roots of VMware back to year 2001 when the company launched its first product "ESX 1.0" which stands for "Elastic Sky X" ( Not sure what is really means ). The real essence is to maximize the hardware utilization by making use of hardware on a sharing basis between different Virtual Machines sitting on top of the ESX software which runs on a bare metal machine and not on top of a third part OS.ESX 1.0 supported 1 CPU , 2GB of Memory, upto 5GB/s of network speed and a massive 5000 IOPS (Input/Output operations per second). Since then till the current release of vSphere 5.0 ( after EX1, ESX2 new release was named as Virtual Infrastrure 3 which then was re-named to vSphere 4 for the next release) these metrics have changed drastically.
VSphere 5 has a support for 32 CPU, 1000GB of Memory, upto 36 GB/s of network speed and 1,000,000 of IOPS. Thats the beauty of VMware and the innovation in the hardware world.

VMware is everywhere, starting from Military infrastructure to Banking to Public Transport Systems.Every IT organization is using VMware/Virtualization to reduce its IT costs and achieve its "Cost to Value" goal. The infographic gives better picture of the ancestors of vSphere 5.0

Hardware, Software & now VMware is currently the third most important word in the IT dictionary.